At Christmas You Tell the Truth
by Blaineandthepips
Summary: This is a short story which forms a continuation from the encounter between Blaine and Kurt in the latest Christmas episode. Blaine and Kurt finally have the serious conversation about their relationship that they have needed to have since their break-up.Set in a picturesque New York street, this is the story of an encounter featuring love, honesty, and an acrostic poem (and fluff)


_A/N: This is simply a short scene that I would have loved to have seen in the latest episode of Glee. I figured, since it is Christmas, I would write it up as a gift to anyone who is interested, and to myself. It's indulgent and fluffy Klaine, but hey, it is Christmas._

_Disclaimer: I own nothing from Glee or from Love Actually._

**At Christmas You Tell the Truth**

Kurt groaned as he rolled over to flail his arm at his obnoxiously blaring alarm clock.

"How is it even possible for the numbers on an alarm clock to seem condescending?" he muttered, throwing his best bitch glare at the large red '05:30' showing on the screen of his clock.

Now, of course, normally Kurt was the most morning-oriented person you would ever meet. It was just on this particular morning, only two days after Christmas, he was feeling a bit like he had been dragged through an emotional wringer.

After all, it's not every night that you find out that your already unwell father has developed prostate cancer, and are then forced to endure a Christmas dinner teeming with awkwardness and tension between yourself and your erstwhile ex-boyfriend.

_Blaine_. For some reason that name just burrowed its way into Kurt's mind like no other noun had ever been able to do. Of course, normally when one thinks of burrowing one thinks of moles, or maybe cute little fluffy bunnies, digging their holes into the earth. But Blaine was just so much more than that. Even more – not only had he made his burrow in the earth of Kurt's heart, but he had also

It might have been the 'holiday season', but that didn't mean that Kurt Hummel was going to let himself get away with having a lazy day. He had to make his Dad, who was staying in Rachel's bedroom, a nice and healthy breakfast. He then had some things that he needed to get done for his internship at Vogue dot com – after all, the life of an intern is never supposed to be fun.

_You can do this, Kurt. You can face the day with a smile on your face. _He thought, steeling his face with determination. After all, as he told himself every morning - it's necessary to just get up and face each day. You never know when a day is going to end up being a special day that changes your life.

KBKBKBKBKB

Having dragged himself into the office to sort out some mannequins for an upcoming photo shoot, Kurt found himself trudging home from the subway station. It was a particularly picturesque New York December evening – a chill in the air and a light smattering of snow, but not enough to shut the city down, falling. He kept trying to repeat his morning mantra to himself, hoping to find some small source of comfort, but all that he really wanted to do was to get home and sit on the couch enjoying his final night with his father before he was planning to return to Lima to spend the remaining few days of the holiday season with Carol and Finn.

He was about two blocks from his and Rachel's flat when he heard rushed footsteps coming up behind them. Not paying any particular notice, he subconsciously moved closer to the building next to him in order to allow the hurried New Yorker somewhere behind him ample room to pass.

Then, suddenly, he heard an almost frantic call.

"Kurt!"

He would know that voice anywhere – Blaine. But Blaine was no longer supposed to be in New York - he had flown out of the city on Christmas Day to visit his brother Cooper in Los Angeles.

Hearing Blaine call his name distracted him, and he turned around to look for his ex-boyfriend. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that he had moved closer to the side of the building, and he promptly tripped over a bench that had been partly obscured by snow. He hit the ground hard, feeling his knees bruising through the denim of his jeans.

For a second, his world consisted of pain.

Suddenly, warm hands were on his shoulders, grasping him firmly and guiding him towards the bench which had just been the object of his unflattering demise.

"Kurt?" came Blaine's concerned voice. "Kurt, are you alright? Can you tell me what hurts?"

Kurt took a few deep breaths to steady himself before raising his own arms and reluctantly pushing Blaine away before standing up slightly unsteadily. Blaine went to grasp his elbow again, but Kurt pulled slightly away so that Blaine's hand ended up dropping uselessly back to his side.

Rather than answering Blaine's question, Kurt chose to ask one of his own.

"What are you doing here, Blaine? You said you were getting on a plane to L.A."

Blaine looked quite surprised at the sudden change of focus, but he quickly pulled himself together.

"I was in L.A., being mercilessly teased by Cooper, as per usual, but I couldn't stop thinking about you. So I came back. I need to talk to you, Kurt, please."

"We talked on Christmas Eve, Blaine."

"We talked with your Dad as a mediator, Kurt. I need to be totally honest with you. As honest as you can only be with the person you love."

"I need to get home, Blaine. It's freezing out here, and I don't want my knee to seize up." Kurt hedged, gesturing towards the bench they were now standing a few feet away from.

Blaine could see in his face that Kurt knew using his knee and the bench as an excuse was a desperate attempt to avoid the discussion, but he couldn't work out what he was afraid of.

"Kurt, please – I probably wouldn't have even caught up to you if it wasn't for that stupid bench. Please listen to me. Please. At least tell me what you're afraid of. We need to have this conversation."

Kurt blanched a little at being so blatantly called out by Blaine.

"I'm…" he began, pausing to look at the ground and aimlessly wring his hands, "I'm afraid _of_ the conversation, Blaine. And of what comes after. This conversation is something you only get to have once. It will change things, and I'm still not completely sure what I think or what I feel."

"Okay," replied Blaine, an expression of determination crossing his face, "I'm terrified of this conversation, too. I'm terrified that we will have this conversation, and that will be the end of everything. I'm terrified that we won't have this conversation and everything that there ever was between us will decay and crumble like some ancient neglected ruins. But most of all I'm afraid that whatever we do – if we talk now or if we never talk again – I'm afraid that it will hurt you. And I can't stand for you to hurt anymore. So, I think we have to talk, to avoid both of our fear."

"Blaine," Kurt tried again, but any protests died on his lips at the sight of the earnest, almost pleading, look on Blaine's face.

"Okay," he muttered weakly.

Blaine looked shocked, as if he couldn't believe that this was finally happening.

"Okay," he repeated. "Well… um, firstly, you need to know that I adore you, and that I am so, so, sorry about what happened."

"Blaine."

Blaine could tell from the warning tone in Kurt's voice that rehashing everything that had happened would not be a good idea.

"It's just, I love you, Kurt. I can't imagine my life without you. And, you know, it's sort of a bit like Hugh Grant says in _Love Actually,_ 'Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world'…" Blaine trailed off, visibly choking back his emotions.

He took a couple of deep breaths, staring at Kurt with his huge, earnest, hazel eyes.

Finally, he began speaking again, breaking the tense and expectant silence.

"Sometimes I get gloomy with the state of the world, but then I think about you. You're amazing, Kurt. You're so perfectly imperfect, and that makes you perfect for me. And just the thought that I'm allowed to even exist on the same planet as you makes me think that there must be something right about the make-up of the world. I know I'm imperfect, Kurt, and I'm not perfectly imperfect like you. But then when I get to look at you, think about you, hold you, even kiss you – those are the only times in my entire existence that I just feel _right_, you know?"

By this point Blaine was well past the point of tearing up. His tears were forging winding tracks down his cheeks - small rivers of warmth tracking down his chilled face. The feeling was oddly poetic, with the ever-growing cracks in his frozen face mirroring the fractures that had been growing in his heart from the very moment he entered Eli C's house. Blaine knew with every fibre of his being that the only way those cracks would stand a chance of beginning to heal was with Kurt. However, at the same time, he was all too aware that, even though Kurt was the subject of all of his hopes and dreams, sometimes life, or, in this case Kurt, doesn't give second chances.

"Look, Blaine, it's the Christmas season, and it's New York, and it's snowing, and you always know what to say…" This time it was Kurt's turn to drift off, taking a few seconds to collect himself, trying with every fibre of his being to pull himself together enough to say what he had to say.

He had to look away from Blaine's earnest face and puppy-dog eyes as he continued. "But, to return to your _Love Actually_ obsession for a second – 'would you stay; knowing life would always be a little bit worse? Or would you cut and run?'"

"It's just, I…. I just…. I love you so much, Kurt. From the moment I watched you sing Blackbird. And I screwed up. I screwed up more royally than anyone has ever screwed up in their lives. Like, as in more of a royal screw up than whoever signed off on the foundations for the Tower of Pisa. But… but that became a famous tourist attraction after all. It got past the idiocy of its construction and made something of itself. And… and, Kurt, I really believe we can make something of this. Our love isn't just some high school romance. I feel complete when I'm with you, Kurt, and I'm going to go on working and trying to make you believe it for as long as you'll let me. I love you and I'm never going to forgive myself for what I did to you. And if you want me to go and be out of your life, I'll go, because I love you _so_ much – but I'll never stop thinking about you – and all you will have to do is breathe my name and I know that I'll just know and come straight to you, and…"

Kurt had stood silently throughout Blaine's entire tirade, letting his words seep into his soul, frozen in the onslaught of the feelings that he had spent the weeks since their break-up supressing beneath his ice-cold protective walls.

"_Blaine!_ You're rambling!" Kurt took what might have been the deepest breath he had ever taken. It felt as if the cold winter air reached right in to his very core.

"But… I think… Um… 'it's Christmas and at Christmas you tell the truth', right? And my truth is that I love you. I never really stopped. You tore me apart at the seams, and I still never stopped loving you. And over these last few weeks I never stopped loving you, and I hated myself for that, and I hated you even more for that. But I also thought about Chandler, and how, while I didn't do… well, _that_… you still said at the time that you felt like you had lost some part of me. I didn't understand that then, but I think I came to. Or, at least, I felt that if you'd felt even one hundredth of what I felt, then you must have never loved me, because if you loved me you would never have wanted to put me through that. That thought made me hate you more, and hate me more for still feeling like I wasn't complete without you."

At Kurt's description of his pain, Blaine's eyes became even more tear-filled than they had been previously.

"Kurt…" he began.

"No, Blaine, I need to say this, please."

Blaine nodded silently, completely focused on Kurt and unaware of all the passers-by going about their lives around this defining moment of his own.

"I think the next thing I realised was that I didn't want my life to be filled with hate. Then I came to realise that what I felt when I thought about you… no, actually, about what happened, it wasn't hate. It was hurt. And hurt is so much worse, because it feels like my insides are just being torn to threads which are then eaten by an army of starving insects. The worst part of that isn't even the totally disgusting insects – it's the feeling of emptiness tinged with the memory of pain. That feeling is the worst because it doesn't go away, it remains."

Both of the young men felt like they were completely stuck in this moment with the world floating past outside. Blaine almost felt like whatever Kurt said next put him in the position of someone faced with a choice between cutting two unmarked wires in trying to diffuse a bomb – one of two things would happen, either his life would be allowed to continue, or the world has he knew it would either cease to exist.

"But when I think about you…"

_Here it comes._

"When I think about you – not about the bad stuff, but just about you – that's when it doesn't hurt quite as much anymore."

Blaine was convinced that the only time he'd ever felt something quite that amazing was when he had first realised he had been looking for Kurt forever.

"I love you, Blaine. And, I think, pain has to be part of life, because you can't define the good in life without experiencing the bad to make you realise how bad it is. And I wish more than anything that neither of us had ever had to experience any of that pain at the other's hands. But we did. And maybe that's life. But I still love you."

The flood gates had opened now. Kurt's complexion was going to despise him for this, but all his pent up emotion simply had to come pouring out.

"Does this mean…" began Blaine tentatively.

"Yes," Kurt replied to Blaine's unanswered question, "I want to try this again. I want to be with you. But – slowly. We have a lot to build back up, and it's going to take a lot of work."

Behind all of their tears both of the young men had huge smiles threatening to break through.

"Can I… Can I kiss you?" asked Blaine.

"No."

At that one simple syllable Blaine's face completely fell. He tried to stop it. In that moment, he tried to convince himself that what he had wanted was to have a chance with Kurt, and that that chance was what he had wanted desperately for weeks on end. But he'd missed all of Kurt – his laughs, his hugs, his obsession with all things vogue, and the feeling of his lips on his.

"But…" Kurt began speaking again, jolting Blaine out of his internal musings.

It happened quickly. Blaine didn't even have time to register as Kurt quickly leaned over, gently grabbing the lapels of his jacket and leaning in towards him.

Suddenly, Kurt's lips were pressed to Blaine's in a chaste kiss. It was perfection. Warmth, love, home.

All too suddenly, Kurt gently removed his lips from Blaine. "I will kiss you," he mumbled, almost inaudibly.

Both of the young men stood completely still. They were staring at each other, occasionally with one or the other's gazes dropping to stare longingly at the others lips. Neither were aware of how long they were stood there, but eventually they began to realise that this interaction was beginning to become quite awkward. They were both clearly happy, but the direction that they were supposed to move in now was not entirely clear. Reconnecting was what both had secretly desired, but the practical reality was not as tidy or as simple as the romantic idea.

Finally, it was Blaine that broke the silence.

"Kurt, when I came here to talk to you today, I went through all sorts of scenarios in my head about how this conversation would go. I tried to think of everything I could that would make you listen to me, and hopefully, convince you of how much I loved you."

Kurt cocked his head to the side inquisitively, wondering where Blaine was going with this.

Blaine was starting to look quite nervous. "Ummm… walk with me?" he requested, offering Kurt his arm with a gallant flourish.

Kurt quietly accepted, taking Blaine's warm and muscular arm into his hands.

"So, most of my ideas were pretty cheesy…. I mean, you probably guessed that, but… yeah. I thought I'd write you a song, though. You know, try and encapsulate my true feelings about you in some really honest words…."

Kurt was looking hard at Blaine now, his curiosity at the idea of a song evident in his face.

"I think I was just too jittery for it to really work, to be honest. When I write a song about you – when, not if – it's going to be the most perfect song ever. But, when I was thinking about everything that I love about you in this instance, it sort of… well….um…" Blaine hesitated.

It wasn't Kurt's expectant glance that made him continue. It was the look behind it, the look that reminded him so much of how Kurt used to look at him – like he loved him – that inspired him. That look made Blaine continue.

"I… um… well, it kind of turned into an acrostic poem."

"A what?" Kurt let out a chuckle in his lovely melodic voice.

Blaine blushed. "An acrostic poem. You know, where each of the letters in a word is the first letter of each sentence in the poem."

"Like in kindergarten?" teased Kurt gently.

"Um… well… yeah. But way more sophisticated than that."

"Mmmhmmm." Kurt hummed, looking at Blaine expectantly.

"You want to hear it?" asked Blaine, his embarrassment clearly rising.

"Of course I want to hear what you planned to use to woo me."

"Oh… well… um, okay. But no laughing!" cautioned Blaine. "Here goes, then."

"**K**isses with you leave me breathless, floating in a sea of life, hope, promise and commitment.

"**U**nique is a word that doesn't even begin to describe everything that is perfect about you.

"**R**eality doesn't seem as harsh when you are there to make the very air that I breathe better.

"**T**unes of love always make my heart turn to you.

"**H**uge is only word that can truly describe the size of the ginormous, cavernous love that I have for you.

"**U**mbridge is the meanest character in Harry Potter, and I would serve a thousand detentions with her just to spend one more day with you.

"**M**eant to be is the cliché phrase that first comes to mind when I think of you and me together.

"**M**usic only has meaning for me now when I think of you. Without you, I might as well be living a mono-tonal song.

"**E**verything I do, everything I think, every time I breathe, I do it for you.

"**L**ove is the only word to describe how I feel for you, Kurt Hummel. Love."

Blaine cleared his throat, looking into Kurt's eyes which were filled to the brim with emotion. As he had listed he'd mostly remained silent, only letting out small teary chuckles at some of Blaine's most adorably dorky lines.

This time, Blaine leaned slowly towards Kurt. He tilted his head up slightly as their lips collided.

Together.


End file.
